Fashion Week 2009

Retail therapy is real, and it is dangerous. Who hasn't succumbed to shopping's siren call when things are this bleak, even if your checking account can't handle it?

With all the problems that plague Africa, coupled with the current economic turbulence, people are asking if a lavish, no-expenses-spared fashion week is what the continent really needs.

The Bryant Park tent complex is normally very heavily guarded by security and is usually only for fashion insiders, but Wednesday Diane von Furstenberg welcomed her fellow cardmembers to take part in the fashion foray.

In fairness to the harbingers of gloomy grays and browns, it's not that designers forgot we're in a depression -- they just guessed wrong at how the fashion world would deal with the drama.

With Spring 2009 trends stomping down runways worldwide it seems designers from Madrid to London to Paris to Milan to New York are complimenting, or e...